Stardust Families Take Their Campaign on the Road, Still Looking for Accountability

Many of those who stopped to talk outside St Michael’s on Marine Road in Dún Laoghaire on Saturday could remember where they were when the Stardust fire happened.

“It’s after being amazing the response we’re getting,” says Antoinette Keegan, who lost her two sisters, Mary and Martina, that day.

“So many people are stopping and talking about it. They remember where they were, where they lived,” she says.

The fire broke out in the early hours of the morning of 14 February 1981. Forty-eight people were killed. Another 214 people were injured.

Some relatives say they has yet to be accountability. The midday church bells sound as Eugene Kelly takes up his placard, which shows the faces of the victims.

“Justice for Stardust families!” he shouts. Members of this campaign want a new inquiry into the Stardust fire.

“Sign a postcard,” he says.

A 1981 tribunal of inquiry found that the probable cause of the fire was arson.

In 1982, inquests were held into the deaths, but no verdicts were returned and no charges have ever been brought. “What we’re looking for is a verdict,” says Keegan.

In 2009, the tribunal’s finding naming the cause as arson was withdrawn from the record. An independent examination found that there was no evidence that the fire was deliberate.

Keegan holds 100 postcards in her right hand, a blue pen in the other, and asks those passing to sign their names.

As the group gathers signatures, the postcards are dropped into a large plastic box beneath a propped-up central table next to the low church wall dividing the footpath.

“One lady [told us] that her son was an altar boy the day that one of the victims was getting buried,” says Keegan. Her grandson, Adam, runs back and forth, asking those who pass down Marine Road to sign, too.

This campaign continues across generations, says Keegan. “My grandchildren grew up with the Stardust. It’s affected the families so badly.”

“Little man there is after collecting the most,” says her mother, Christine Keegan, sat in her wheelchair, clutching a disposable purple lighter in her left hand, a packet of uncut Players cigarettes in the other.

Keegan has campaigned since shortly after the Stardust fire in which she lost her two daughters.

“We’re nearly ready to go. I think. We’re after getting loads of [signatures],” she says, surveying the foothpath, the people approaching from George’s Street and down from Convent Road into the main village.

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